George C. Rimnac, 52, is vice president and chief technologist at W.W. Grainger Inc., a Lake Forest, Ill.-based distributor of facilities maintenance products. He was a pioneer in distributed and peer-to-peer computing in the 1980s. …mehr

What constitutes IT leadership? What milestones must an IT executive reach to achieve that status? What recognition or position must he attain in order to become a leader in a profession that counts among its members some of the most dynamic and innovative individuals any of us will ever encounter? …mehr

The Yellow Pages isn't resting on its laurels following its recent re-launch. Despite seeing a 20 percent increase in usage, the Yellow Pages has launched its free online mapping service for businesses. …mehr

A benchmark is defined as a standard used for comparison. It's a term usually reserved for measures, but I've had the honor of working with a person who fits the definition -- Gerry Higgins, vice president of Verizon's IT infrastructure (or VIPS, as it's know internally). …mehr

Change is now the only constant in most corporate IT shops. Not only do today's technology leaders make systems-related decisions that affect thousands of users, but they also must react quickly to market shifts and hustle to appease zealous CEOs bent on getting ahead in fast-paced industries. …mehr

Today's IT leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to bury their heads in U.S. soil. Even domestic companies are finding offshore partners or are testing the waters of emerging overseas markets -- or they soon will. And multinationals that already span the globe are increasingly reining in decentralized IT operations and striving to create a portfolio of global IT standards and applications that also accommodate local variances. …mehr

Cisco Systems Inc. Tuesday will announce a set of four network management products and an equal number of companion services, all based on a service-oriented framework that Cisco officials detailed here last week. …mehr

Sun Microsystems Inc. this week announced new servers based on its UltraSparc T1 processor but still remained mum on its storage plans. Randy Kerns , the new vice president of strategy and planning for Sun's Data Management Group, spoke with Computerworld last week about the status of the integration of recently acquired Storage Technology Corp. and Sun's plan to address the coming threat to tape systems of holographic storage. …mehr

Rebecca "Becky" A. Blalock, 49, is corporate CIO and senior vice president at Southern Co. in Atlanta. A 27-year veteran of the US$12 billion energy company, Blalock's first IT job was as one of Southern's five regional CIOs, at subsidiary Georgia Power Co. She recently presided over Project LightNet, a communications network overhaul that's expected to save the company $78 million over 10 years. She talked recently with Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes. …mehr

Vodafone 3G customers who find themselves transmitting data on the slower GPRS network could be in for a nasty shock when they receive their bill. A billing problem has seen one company charged extra for GPRS traffic regardless of how much 3G traffic it had remaining. …mehr

A glance at a single day's jam-packed schedule for Mark Popolano, 48, senior vice president and CIO at American International Group Inc. (AIG), offers insight into the approach he favors for managing the global IT operations of the international insurance and financial services conglomerate. …mehr

Top technology officials who toil daily in heavily regulated environments offer these words of encouragement to companies new to the struggles of compliance: What doesn't kill or bankrupt you makes you stronger. …mehr

IT managers at last week's data center conference in Las Vegas packed a presentation on server consolidation, just as they have at similar events in the past. Attendees such as Alfred Masse were seeking to compare their own consolidation experiences with the results of a survey that Gartner conducted on the topic last summer. …mehr

The SANS Institute, a Bethesda, Maryland-based cybersecurity training and certification company, today announced that it will start offering two graduate-level degree programs in information security engineering and management beginning in February. …mehr

William Westrate, 44, was vice president and CIO at food and facilities management company Aramark Corp. until Sept. 30, 2005. While in that role, he headed up the development and rollout of a tool called ISISpro to integrate data about housekeeping, patient transportation, clinical equipment management and plant operations for Aramark's front-line managers and its hospital customers. Computerworld's Heather Havenstein talked with him about his work. …mehr

As CIO and vice president of information technology services at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Lev S. Gonick, 46, works with 191 IT employees and provides stewardship of a US$38 million IT budget. …mehr

Since becoming CIO at Rockford, Ill.-based Rockford Health System in November 1994, Dennis L'Heureux has reported to two CEOs and an interim chief executive. He has also worked with four chief financial officers and three human resources directors during his tenure, so, he says, "I've had to rebuild a lot of relationships over time." …mehr

There were a few murmurs of surprise at Gartner Inc.'s annual data center conference in Las Vegas last week when more than 40 percent of the attendees who responded to a poll of the audience said mainframes are still part of their IT environments. …mehr

Information technology can be wonderfully agile when we have careful planning, standard processes and great communication. That's the message Computerworld's Julia King got from the IT leaders among this year's Premier 100. In fact, it's that stability that makes real IT agility possible. …mehr

Only three of Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.'s 30 developers have expertise in using the native programming language for Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server database. So for two major upcoming IT projects, the New York-based exchange hopes to write database code using general-purpose programming languages that all of the developers know. …mehr

Elizabeth Hackenson, 45, executive vice president and CIO at MCI Inc., began her career more than 25 years ago as a data entry clerk at Univac. After that, she worked at systems integrator Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Concert Communications Services, where she had a business role in building new products. She began her career at MCI as a vice president heading up strategic development for CRM and consolidated billing projects before she became CIO in October 2004. She recently spoke with Computerworld's Heather Havenstein. …mehr

When Dianah Neff was appointed CIO of Philadelphia in 2001, the country's fifth-largest city had virtually no IT governance in place. Decisions were made but not always executed. Goals were set, but projects were never initiated. …mehr

Dell Inc. general manager of storage Darren Thomas and Dell President Kevin Rollins were scheduled to visit Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp. Friday to discuss the three-year-old OEM relationship between the two companies. Ahead of that visit, Thomas stopped by Computerworld's offices to talk about Dell's plans to more tightly integrate its PowerVault systems management software with EMC's hardware and to discuss how Dell plans to boost external storage systems revenues. The Dell/EMC relationship has been a boon for both companies, with combined storage sales growing 30.8 percent this past quarter to US$1.26 billion, according to IDC. …mehr

Find out the true cost of moving to IP telephony before making any final decision, because it is rare to find companies that have actually achieved any real savings, according to Ericsson enterprise division director Chris Pattas. …mehr

Two major New York hospitals have joined with a vendor of smart-card technologies on a pilot project to provide patients with portable health care records and give doctors better access to that data. …mehr

Hoping to capture more seats in the enterprise, Salesforce.com will introduce Salesforce Sandbox as part of its Winter 2006 release. Sandbox is a full parallel copy of a company's production environment to be used for testing, development, and end-user training. …mehr

Network General Corp., which makes network and application performance analysis products, including its well-known Sniffer line, today announced the appointment of industry veteran Bill Gibson as its CEO. He will also serve on the Network General board as a voting member. …mehr

Share, a Chicago-based IBM user group, has assembled a "wish list" of things it would like vendors to do to address some of the IT issues large enterprises face. Many of the items on Share's list call for improved vendor interoperability around file systems and identity management, according to Share President Robert Rosen, who is also CIO of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Rosen also outlined the user group's motives and some of its needs in an interview with Computerworld. Among the items on the group's list: enterprise-worthy open-source software, easier server consolidation, interoperable calendaring capabilities, longer-lasting batteries for mobile computing, and a standards-based distributed file system. …mehr

Terry P. Brooks, 51, division manager of information services at Yamaha Motor Corporation U.S.A., is already thinking through IT issues before most people are out of bed. Here's what a typical day looks like for this IT leader, who manages about 125 people and is responsible for long-term IT strategy at Yamaha. …mehr

Only three of Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.'s 30 developers have expertise in using the native programming language for Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server database. So for two major upcoming IT projects, the New York-based exchange hopes to write database code using general-purpose programming languages that all of the developers know. …mehr

For Julie F. Butcher, vice president of IT at home builder MDC Holdings Inc. in Centennial, Colo., the day starts early and ends late, with few quiet moments in between. Here's an inside look at a day in the life of one of the country's top CIOs. …mehr

CIO Andres Carvallo presented a grim prognosis for Austin Energy 's IT systems to company executives during a meeting in January 2003. The 10th-largest public power utility in the nation had spent several years building IT silos without a CIO at the helm. The company was rife with inefficiencies. There were too many manual processes, the utility was paying twice with redundant systems, companywide IT standards were nonexistent, and executives didn't have real-time data for making decisions. …mehr

Tech director decides to oversee the test of the data center's UPS. Notices are sent, the test window time is reached, and just as the network admin is about to pull the plug on the UPS, tech director flips the UPS's switch instead. "At the sudden silence in the server room, the tech director realized his error," reports a pilot fish on the scene. "He turned to the network admin and sighed, 'Just goes to show why you should never let management help.'" …mehr

The assumption that network port scans are a precursor to attempted hacks into computers may be flawed, according to research from the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. …mehr